From the age of five until 10 I lay awake every night frozen in terror by the thought of the four-minute warning going off when I was at school, which I knew to be at least a five minute run away even on a day when your legs weren’t paralysed by fear. When I at last revealed all to my mother, she brought sweet relief and the return of Morpheus by responding: “Don’t be so daft! There’ll be all sorts of palaver before a war starts, and I’ll keep you home. And we’re in London! It’s the first place they’ll hit, and we’ll all die together! Now go to sleep.”
My understanding of global nuclear arrangements essentially arrested at this point. Teenage readings of Brother in the Land and Z for Zachariah, set in atomically- and apocalyptically bombed wastelands confirmed it was better not to know.
Everything surrounding the news that Jeremy Corbyn wouldn’t push the button, if button-pushing time ever came, and if – that’s an “if” bigger than all four Vanguard submarines put together – he was in charge of the button at the time, suggests that we all – from frightened five-year-olds, yea even unto the mightiest of men – throw up mental walls around the subject.
The Tories engage in the illogic of “Bigger! Better! More money! Always! Probably some penis issues in the mix too!” along with enough others to ensure that we will now for ever have enough nuclear missiles to destroy the world eleventy billion times over. This is the adult equivalent of marching round the house shouting “La, la, la!” with your hands over your ears until someone smacks your bum and sends you to bed.
Corbyn insists that he won’t frazzle anything or join in the enfrazzlement, or refrazzle anything that’s left after the enfrazzling’s begun – and not just because he’ll be good and enfrazzled already himself. But he won’t tell others in the party what to do – and not just because most of them would like to up and enfrazzle him themselves. But if he does become PM, we are effectively disarmed. His letter of last resort will apparently be a chickpea curry recipe and a (really) sadface.
And the letters themselves – they get written by every PM and sent to a safe within a safe within each of the four submarines carrying our weaponry, to be opened by their commanders in the event that the government and all other chains of command fall, fail or are frazzled. That’s not a sensible way of going on: that’s something someone saw in a film and thought looked cool, surely. It’s a way to pretend to ourselves that it’s all just a story. It can’t be real. It is too awful to contemplate, so we hedge it round with devices that make it look like a cautionary tale. Here be dragons, but Denzel Washington or Daniel Craig will save us. Four Minute Warning – coming soon only to a cinema screen near you, with any luck.
Sorry is the harvest word
I’ve just had the list of items requested by my son’s school for harvest festival. In my day, you took in a few posh cans of soup or a bag of apples, and the teachers handed them over to some faintly embarrassed residents of the local old people’s home. My son’s list has been compiled with great care by a national charity that will distribute the goods via local food banks. I feel like apologising to him. “Sorry about this world I brought you into, kid. Mummy got drunk, briefly envisaged life and history as a tale of linear progression and did away with the condom. Stay lucky.”
Such a Jane Eyre-head
I’m rereading (for a work thing) the Brontës. I can’t remember a thing. Not from previous readings, not as I’m going along. Is there any point to reading anything after the age of 20 or so? Is it all just bouncing off my calcified mind, or is it still porous enough to let something seep down into there eventually? Or is it just Netflix from here on out?
